Pre-Midnight Express

Secret Kebab will serve you anything (sometimes), so long as it’s kebab.

Secret Kebab, as the name might suggest, is a
kebab-smuggling operation, steered by the unseen hand of a shadowy,
mustachioed figure known as Alparslan the Turk, who is also suspected of
being a literary creation. “BOOM BOOM,” he writes when he takes your
online-only order for delivery. There is no storefront whatsoever, and
the website is a cryptic, half-drawn slate. Delivery runs sometimes all
weekend, sometimes only Saturday, from 6 pm until an undisclosed time,
presumably to confound easy surveillance by customers.

Except
when falafel makes a surprise appearance, only one item is offered on
the menu: a $5 kiyma lamb kebab, made Adana-style, with a gently spiced
tube of lamb sausage, beet, carrot, mint sauce and seasonal greens on
fresh-baked flatbread. Still, even this one item is generally sold out
hours or even days before the kebab delivery guy makes his rounds.

Twitter,
nonetheless, has been virulently atitter about it, with over 500
followers on the @secretkebab account. In fact, aside from an email
address available on the site, Twitter is pretty much the only way you
can order a kebab. (A phone number has sometimes appeared, but is always
swiftly removed.)

As it goes, despite
Twitter’s promises of an instantaneous world, we are returning to a
nation of crossed fingers and Sears Roebuck catalogs: Reader, it took me
three weeks to get a kebab. The first weekend I got no response, the
second I used a friend’s Twitter account and was told in the Turk’s very
particular patois that “I am very soory it is not possibel this night I
have taken his every lamb!!,” and the third I ordered 36 hours in
advance to finally get confirmed delivery for the coming Saturday. (This
arrived one hour early.)

Why so much trouble?
Well, these kebabs have sold out pretty much every single weekend since
Secret Kebab’s launch on March 4, sometimes days before their delivery.
It seems that the very difficulty of obtaining one of these kiyma
kebabs—and the secrecy surrounding the owner—has become the most
effective advertisement for their desirability; standing-room crowds are
willing to order two days in advance, with a $3 delivery fee, for what
is essentially street food.

Maybe, though, it’s
just the hope of owning a little piece of the Turk himself. “How I can
to you discribe my joy for the meat sizzles?! My God I can not!!” he
says on Twitter. “The breads are poofing!!” Who wouldn’t want to order
from such a pleasant marketing persona?

Two notes, though: 1)
It’s not really the point, but I should mention that the kebabs are
nonetheless pretty dang good altogether—the greens fresh, the beets
rich, the pita still warm from the oven. 2) Whoever the secretive “Turk”
is, his Turkish is as bad as his English. About the only impromptu
Turkish-language sentence on his Twitter feed, “Ben Türkçe konusurlar,”
is roundly ungrammatical, according to a good Turkish friend. He’d meant
“Ben Türkce konusurum” instead, i.e., I speak Turkish. Which is to say, it was a very gentle lie.